Dative-Infinitive Structures in Russian: Syntax and Semantics

Russian Dative-Infinitive-Structures (DIS) have been a matter of debate, with focus on such issues as mono vs bi-clausality, modal flavour, TAM features and case-marking. I argue that all contextual realizations of Russian DIS sentences express a single flavour in indicative clauses — alethic modality. Russian Dative- Predicative-Structures (DPS) with predicatives like nado, nužno can also express deontic or internal modality. I concur with Mitrenina [2017: 70] that the Russian DIS construction covers three basic alethic modes from four, except for alethic possibility. This generalization holds in indicative DIS clauses, more precisely, in non-interrogative indicative clauses. All proposals to postulate the same piece of structure to DIS and DPS run into trouble. For the first, the dative subject of DPS is obligatory animate, while the subject of DIS is not. For the second, the dative case is assigned structurally in Russian non-finite clauses including DIS, while in finite DPS clauses it is assigned lexically. For the third, DIS subjects are raised, while obligatory animate DPS subjects are syntactic and semantic arguments of the matrix clause predicatives. The meanings of imperative and subjunctive DIS clauses can be modeled on the basis of indicative DIS, while the reversed is false. There is no path to the alethic meaning from any non-veridical uses of DIS. The constraint on perfective infinitives in non-negative DIS clauses disappears in the imperative DIS construction, where the animacy condition arises. This proves the switch from alethic to deontic modals in a different type of clauses.